When drawing detail lines such as shadows and facial shapes, it's tempting to just draw a solid line with the pen tool and call it good. In this tutorial, I'll show you a better way to draw detail lines and shadows.

The pen tool is one of my favorite tools in Illustrator. You can use it to draw pretty much anything, from a straight line, to a fancy curve, to a complicated shape complete with smooth curves and sharp points. When I first started using Illustrator, I played around a bit with the pen tool, but it left me frustrated, and since then I've discovered some tricks that make it worlds easier to work with.